NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 101, 30 May 1941, Page 4

NEW ZEALAND LITERATURE

Sir,-Mr. Mulgan’s reply to G. R. Gilbert escaped my reading, but the latter’s expression of concurrence with "what Mr. Mulgan has said more clearly" (Listener, April 24), still lacks that clarity so modestly and so rightly disclaimed by its writer. "What I tried to say, and what Mr. Mulgan has said more clearly is that in writing about people or places ail that the writer has to orient himself is his race." After stating this, G. R. Gilbert then proceeds, I assume, to demonstrate what this mysterious quality (or is it quantity?) does for a writer, triumphantly continuing his unintelligible verbal capering with "the important things were that Tolstoy was a Russian, and he wrote of the whole world of people in a Russian manner, feeling deeply in the way a Russian would experience such things." Clumsily paraphrased as: "the important things were that Tolstoy was Tolstoy, and he wrote of the whole world of people as only Tolstoy could, feeling deeply in the way he experienced such things," the statement becomes intelligible. Until G. R. Gilbert can clearly understand and define what he means by the term race it were better, for the sake of clarity, if he expunged the word from his vocabulary; for all he demonstrates is the emotional use of a meaningless word. In other words, he feels more about race than he thinks. His remaining remarks on the writing of New Zealanders suffers necessarily from the same defect of loose thinking, mean nothing and require no

other comment.-

J. K.

ALEXANDER

(French Pass).